Senseless? Really? If by “senseless” you mean carried out almost precisely from the scripts of your own movies, then, sure, it was “senseless.”

As for you, Sean Penn, you paragon of endless moralizing, we would like to thank you, too, for underwriting last week’s ultra-violence and real-life carnage at the movie theater. One of the last scenes that 6-year-old saw in her precious life was a trailer for your movie.

In the final clip of a trailer filled with orgiastic bloodshed, you have some classy “actors” with machine guns unload from behind a movie screen into a crowd seated in a theater, watching a film. Ring a bell, Sean? Sound familiar?

For those who want a quick-and-dirty program to tell the players in the main stream media, New York Times and Washington Post are ultra-liberal. New York Post and Washington Times are more conservative, or at least much less liberal.

I completely agree with the sentiments in the article noted. Hollywood needs to start taking responsibility for its promotion of violence and sex. They are changing our culture into something ugly, while raking in millions of dollars. I’m glad Christian Bale quietly visited the survivors. But if he’s truly sincere, he’ll swear off making anymore violent films, and do so publicly.

Adam G.July 25, 2012

Hollywood should be brought to hell. But not all portrayals of violence or sex are incitative. Having not seen any of Nolan’s Batman films, I can’t say they are.

That said, we live in a generally pacific society. If you want to make a case for Hollywood corrupting morals, its probably in the areas of sex and status. To the extent violence corrupts, it probably does it by dehumanizing the rest of mankind and so making you more selfish.

ZenJuly 25, 2012

Adam, I agree much more with your statement than the thrust of this op-ed.

Besides, if we put a naive blanket condemnation on violence, then there are large segments of scripture, particularly the Book of Mormon, that we couldn’t read.

Most white Americans live in a pacific society. Black and Hispanic Americans generally don’t.

If middle class white America ever realizes what really goes on in the streets of our cities, there would be a revolution. I’ve mentioned this speculation to a few policemen who I’ve known, and their reaction was along the lines of “Wow, you get it.”

12 dead and 58 wounded is a drop in the bucket compared to the deaths and wounding via gunfire in Chicago this year. And Chicago is jut one city.

As long as blacks and hispanics kill each other in small (but steady) numbers in the inner cities, that seems OK to our media and politicians. But when a white guy kills a bunch of mostly white people in mostly white suburbia all at once, then “Something must be done!”. Yet, in fact, the Aurora shooting, like Columbine, is the statistical minority, the blip, far outweighted by the thousands of shooting deaths, and tens of thousands of woundings in our inner cities across the country every year.

Where is the outrage over the other scores of murders and hundreds of woundings that occured across the country last week? Is it because those victims were largely Black/Hispanic? Is it because those were committed one, two, or three at a time, instead of 70 at once?